William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) was born on 7 April 1770 in Cockermouth, Cumberland, on the edge of the English Lake District that would become inseparable from his poetry. He was the second of five children; his father, John Wordsworth, was a legal agent to the Earl of Lonsdale, and his mother, Ann Cookson, died when William was seven. The early loss and the subsequent dispersal of the Wordsworth children among relatives left a mark on his poetry’s obsessive return to childhood experience and the consolations of memory.

Life and Career

Wordsworth was educated at Hawkshead Grammar School and St John’s College, Cambridge. During a walking tour of France and Switzerland in 1790 he witnessed the early stages of the French Revolution and was profoundly moved. He returned to France in 1791, fathered a daughter, Caroline, with Annette Vallon — a relationship concealed from the public for over a century — and became a passionate supporter of the Revolution before its descent into the Terror disillusioned him.

The decisive event of Wordsworth’s literary life was his friendship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which began in 1795. The two poets, living in close proximity in Somerset, produced Lyrical Ballads (1798), published anonymously by Joseph Cottle in Bristol. The collection — containing Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” among others — is the single most important publication in the history of English Romantic poetry. Wordsworth’s Preface to the 1800 second edition, arguing that poetry should use “the real language of men” and that its proper subject was “the essential passions of the heart,” became the manifesto of Romanticism.

In 1799 Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy settled at Dove Cottage in Grasmere, in the heart of the Lake District, where they would live for eight years. Dorothy’s journals from this period are remarkable literary documents in their own right and reveal how closely the siblings’ sensibilities were intertwined. In 1802 Wordsworth married Mary Hutchinson, a childhood friend, and the household expanded but Dorothy remained at its centre.

Poems, in Two Volumes (1807) contained many of Wordsworth’s greatest shorter poems, including “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” “The Solitary Reaper,” and the “Sonnets Dedicated to Liberty.” The contemporary reviews were hostile — Francis Jeffrey’s “This will never do” is famous — but the poems established themselves as canonical within a generation.

The Prelude, Wordsworth’s autobiographical epic in blank verse, was begun in 1798 and worked on throughout his life but not published until after his death in 1850. It exists in multiple versions: the two-part version of 1799, the thirteen-book version of 1805, and the heavily revised fourteen-book version published posthumously. Modern scholars generally prefer the 1805 text. It is the greatest long poem in English since Paradise Lost.

Wordsworth’s later decades are often characterised as a decline — politically from radicalism to Tory conservatism, poetically from visionary intensity to pious dullness. This is an oversimplification, but it is true that his best work was largely behind him by 1810. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1843, succeeding Robert Southey, and died on 23 April 1850 at Rydal Mount, Grasmere.

Major Works and Themes

Wordsworth’s great theme is the relationship between the perceiving mind and the natural world — what he called, in “Tintern Abbey,” “the mighty world / Of eye, and ear, — both what they half create, / And what perceive.” His philosophical project, never fully systematised, was to demonstrate that nature educates the moral imagination, that childhood perception carries a visionary power that adult consciousness can partially recover through memory and the act of poetic creation.

Lyrical Ballads (1798) revolutionised English poetry by insisting that the lives of common people — shepherds, leech-gatherers, abandoned women, idiot boys — were fit subjects for serious poetry. The language was deliberately plain; the effects were achieved through rhythm, repetition, and an intensity of attention to ordinary experience that was genuinely new.

The Prelude is Wordsworth’s masterpiece: “the poem to Coleridge,” as he called it — an autobiography of the poetic imagination, tracing its growth from childhood through the crisis of the French Revolution to its recovery in the Lake District. The “spots of time” passages — moments of heightened perception in childhood that sustain the adult imagination — are among the most powerful passages in English poetry.

Critical Reception and Legacy

Wordsworth was the most influential English poet of the nineteenth century. Keats, Shelley, and Byron all defined themselves partly in relation to him; the Victorians — Arnold, Tennyson, Ruskin — revered him. His reputation suffered a long eclipse in the early twentieth century, when modernist critics found him woolly and sentimental, but the recovery began with the New Critics and has continued with the discovery of the 1805 Prelude and the recognition that Wordsworth’s apparently simple language conceals enormous philosophical and psychological complexity.

Key Works

• Lyrical Ballads (1798)
• Poems, in Two Volumes (1807)
• The Excursion (1814)
• Guide through the District of the Lakes (1835)
• The Prelude (1850, posthumous; written 1798–1839)

Collecting Wordsworth

Wordsworth is one of the pillars of Romantic-period book collecting, and the market for his early editions is robust and well-established.

Lyrical Ballads (1798, Joseph Cottle, Bristol) is the supreme Romantic first edition. Published anonymously in a small edition, it is genuinely rare. Copies surface at auction every few years; prices range from $100,000 to over $300,000 depending on condition and binding state. The book was issued in boards with a paper spine label; most surviving copies have been rebound. The 1800 second edition (two volumes, with Wordsworth’s name and the famous Preface) is more obtainable at $10,000–$40,000.

Poems, in Two Volumes (1807, Longman, London) is the next most desirable Wordsworth first edition, containing many of his greatest shorter poems. Copies in the original boards bring $5,000–$20,000.

The Prelude (1850, Edward Moxon, London) first editions bring $1,000–$5,000 depending on condition. It was published in a reasonably large edition.

Early Wordsworth items — An Evening Walk (1793) and Descriptive Sketches (1793), his first two separately published poems — are very scarce and bring strong prices when they appear.

Wordsworth manuscripts and autograph letters are held primarily by the Wordsworth Trust at Dove Cottage. Letters surface at auction and bring $1,000–$10,000 depending on content. The major private collection was that of Jonathan Wordsworth (a descendant), much of which has passed to institutional hands.